Chapter 1 - Page 2

to the sea, and he envied the lot of that inanimate thing now
growing small and indistinct in the deepening darkness. As he lost sight
of it altogether he began to wonder how far out to sea it would drift.
Would the current carry it north or south? South, probably, till it
drifted in sight of Celebes, as far as Macassar, perhaps!

Macassar! Almayer's quickened fancy distanced the tree on its imaginary
voyage, but his memory lagging behind some twenty years or more in point
of time saw a young and slim Almayer, clad all in white and
modest-looking, landing from the Dutch mail-boat on the dusty jetty of
Macassar, coming to woo fortune in the godowns of old Hudig. It was an
important epoch in his life, the beginning of a new existence for him.
His father, a subordinate official employed in the Botanical Gardens of
Buitenzorg, was no doubt delighted to place his son in such a firm. The
young man himself too was nothing loth to leave the poisonous shores of
Java, and the meagre comforts of the parental bungalow, where the father
grumbled all day at the stupidity of native gardeners, and the mother
from the depths of her long easy-chair bewailed the lost glories of
Amsterdam, where she had been brought up, and of her position as the
daughter of a cigar dealer there.

Almayer had left his home with a light heart and a lighter pocket,
speaking English well, and strong in arithmetic; ready to conquer the
world, never doubting that he would.

After those twenty years, standing in the close and stifling heat of a
Bornean evening, he recalled with pleasurable regret the image of Hudig's
lofty and cool warehouses with their long and straight avenues of gin
cases and bales of Manchester goods; the big door swinging noiselessly;
the dim light of the place, so delightful after the glare of the streets;
the little railed-off spaces amongst piles of merchandise where the
Chinese clerks, neat, cool, and sad-eyed, wrote rapidly and in silence
amidst the din of the working gangs rolling casks or shifting cases to a
muttered song, ending with a desperate yell. At the upper end, facing
the great door, there was a larger space railed off, well lighted; there
the noise was subdued by distance, and above it rose the soft and
continuous clink of silver guilders which other discreet Chinamen were
counting and piling up under the supervision of Mr. Vinck, the cashier,
the genius presiding in the place--the right hand of the Master.

In that clear space Almayer worked at his table not far from a little
green painted door, by which always stood a Malay in a red sash and
turban, and whose hand, holding a small string dangling from above, moved
up and down with the regularity of a machine. The string worked a punkah
on the